The following text is taken from 'The most
radical gesture: The Situationist International in a postmodern age' by
Sadie Plant and published by Routledge. Read it, and live without dead time.

...The situationists' desire to become psychogeographers, with an
understanding of the 'precise laws and specific effects of the geographical
environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour
of individuals', was intended to cultivate an awareness of the ways in
which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled, the ways in
which this manipulation can be exposed and subverted, and the possibilities
for chosen forms of constructed situations in the post-spectacular world.
Only an awareness of the influences of the existing environment can encourage
the critique of the present conditions of daily life, and yet it is precisely
this concern with the environment which we live which is ignored.

"The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few
meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres;
the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless
strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground);
the appealing or repelling character of certain places - all this seems
to be neglected."
Guy Debord, '
Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography

Concealed by the functional drudgery of city life, such areas of psychogeographical
research were seen as the ground of a new realm of experiment with the
possibilities of everyday experience.

One of psychogeography's principle means was the dérive. Long a favorite
practice of the dadaists, who organized a variety of expeditions, and the
surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive
pleasure, the dérive, or drift, was defined by the situationists as the
'technique of locomotion without a goal', in which 'one or more persons
during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action,
their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves
be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find
there'. The dérive acted as something of a model for the 'playful creation'
of all human relationships.

Unlike surrealist automatism, the dérive was not a matter of surrendering
to the dictates of an unconscious mind or irrational force. Indeed, the
situationists' criticisms of surrealism concluded that 'the unconscious
imagination is poor, that automatic writing is monotonous, that the whole
genre of ostentatious surrealist "weirdness" has ceased to be very surprising'.
Nor was everything subordinated to the sovereignty of choice: to dérive
was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate
with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons
for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It
was very much a matter of using an environment for one's own ends, seeking
not only the marvelous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective
to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world. Potlatch carried a lovely
example of this inversion of priorities in the form of a letter addressed
to The Times protesting against the redevelopment of London's Chinese quarter.
After a defense of the area itself, the letter ends:

"Anyway, it is inconvenient that this Chinese quarter of London should
be destroyed before we have the opportunity to visit it and carry out certain
psychogeographical experiments we are at present undertaking... if modernization
appears to you, as it does to us, to be historically necessary, we would
counsel you to carry your enthusiasm into areas more urgently in need of
it, that is to say, your political and moral institutions."

...the situationists developed an armoury of confusing weapons intended
constantly to provoke critical notice of the totality of lived experience
and reverse the stultifying passivity of the spectacle. 'Life can never
be too disorientating,' wrote Debord and Wolman, in support of which they
described a friend's experience wandering 'through the Harz region of Germany
while blindly following the directions of a map of London.'

Such disorientation was not craved for its own sake. But as a means
of showing the concealed potential of experimentation, pleasure, and play
in everyday life, the situationists considered a little chaos to be a valuable
means to exposing the way in which the experiences made possible by capitalist
production could be appropriated within a new enabling system of social
relations.

An example of a situation-creating technique is the dérive. The dérive is the first step toward an urban praxis. It is a stroll through the city by several
people who are out to understand the "psychogeographical articulation of the modern city". The strollers attempt an interpretive reading of the
city, an architectural understanding. They look at the city as a special instance of repressed desires. At the same time, they engage in "playful
reconstructive behavior". Together they turn the city around. They see in the city unifying and empowering possibilities in place of the present
fragmentation and pacification. This "turning around" or détournment is a key strategic concept of the Situationists. Détournment is a dialectical tool. It is
an "insurrectional style" by which a past form is used to show its own inherent untruth-- an untruth masked by ideology. It can be applied to billboards, to
written texts, to films, to cartoons, etc., as well as to city spaces. Marx used it when he "turned Hegel on his head." He used the dialectic in the study of
history to expose the ideological nature of Hegel's idealism. The Situationists use détournment to demonstrate the scandalous poverty of everyday life
despite the plenty of commodities. They attempted to demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be. They wanted to
rupture the spell of the ideology of our commodified consumer society so that our repressed desires of a more authentic nature could come forward. The
situation is based on liberated desires rather than alienated ones. What these desires are cannot be stated a priori. They will emerge in the revolutionary
process of situation-creation, of détournment. Presumably, communality, unification, and public urban space will emerge as more desirable than
commodification, fragmentation, and privatization.